The Backpedal #6 - The Secret Race
New Year, new you, back doing this again…
I haven’t done one for ages!
Alright, alright, go on so. What is it this time?
Well, this is an interesting one. The book itself is The Secret Race by Tyler Hamilton. And I firmly believe we’ve collectively forgotten what it was like to follow professional cycling around the time this book came out. It was between the time when Lance Armstrong finally retired after the 2011 Tour Down Under but before USADA closed in on him and he ended up talking to Oprah Winfrey. During those months (and directly before and after them really), the news cycle involved more about this story than it did about any racing.
If you include all the caveats about doping being bad and careers that were ruined, it was a thrilling time to be a cycling fan. There was actual shocking breaking news on a weekly basis. My memory is that there were ‘reports’ that ex-teammates of Armstrong had been speaking to and providing information to USADA, but what that information consisted of, we still were not sure. Hamilton’s book didn’t cause the downfall of Armstrong. Hamilton’s testimony would have helped the case but Armstrong would have ended up being caught and punished regardless. What Hamilton’s book did though was blow the lid off the entire story from our perspective. For cycling fans, it laid out all the dirty secrets from a primary source. This wasn’t a ‘reportedly’ situation or a ‘my sources suggest’. This was ‘I was there sticking needles in my arm and this is where we hid the drugs’. It was blockbuster.
Almost seems quaint now. All this stuff is taken as a given these days.
I think there’s probably some truth to that. Doping memoirs have become more and more commonplace. It became more acceptable and accepted for ex-riders to open up about this topic. There had been confessions in the past but they always felt like half-confessions - Richard Virenque crying, Johan Museeuw releasing a statement and then never wanting to talk about it again, the flurry of Team Telekom confessions in 2007 and 2008. They all felt a bit half-arsed, the bare minimum. Hamilton’s book was comprehensive and utterly alarming in its detail.
What do you mean alarming? We all kind of knew what was going on.
Ah it wasn’t just a list of products and who did what that was alarming. It was the human element to it as it always is with these stories. It was Hamilton’s descriptions of the grubby scenarios he put himself into in order to cheat. This was dirty in every sense of the word. If you really think about the reality of self-administering a defrosted blood bag to yourself in a shite hotel room, like really think about that scenario, it’s ghoulish. Also alarming were Hamilton’s descriptions of how he knew he was ready to compete, that he was finally at his optimal race weight and the indication of that was that his wife could see his internal organs through his translucent skin.
Yeah that’s ghastly. So what page did the randomation station give us?
Page 108. And one thing stuck out immediately which was this line from Hamilton:
Tour de France champion Bernard Hinault hated stairs so much that during some Tours, he would have his soigneurs carry him into the hotels rather than walk.
I haven’t checked back through any Hinault books to check, but surely, surely, this is absolute nonsense. One of those stories that someone made up at one stage to add some more colour to a hagiographical article and the story was repeated elsewhere and became a thing. It’s not a thing. If you have proof that Hinault was given a queen’s chair into the local Ibis then please leave the evidence in the comments section.
And Hinault only rode Paris-Roubaix once. Anything else? Must be something better than a throw-away line about Hinault?
Yes. I was reminded of the name ‘del Moral’ whom Hamilton refers to while explaining about organising burner phones to contact del Moral to get his drugs. Del Moral is Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral who worked for US Postal, Hamilton’s team at the time. And in looking him up today I had realised I had forgotten his inadvertent involvement in forming the current management of the Jayco-Alula Team.
Wait, what?
Yeah, it’s tenuous, but let me explain. In 2011 Matt White was working as a DS for Garmin-Cervelo, Jonathan Vaughters’s team. For whatever reason (I don’t believe it was ever satisfactorily explained), White decided to send one of the team’s riders Trent Lowe to Dr. Del Moral who no longer worked for any cycling team. The use of any external doctor without team permission, in and of itself regardless of any suggestion of doping, was deemed to be in contravention of team rules and White was fired. Now bear in mind this was still 2011 (coincidentally, White was sacked on Lance Armstrong’s final race day as a pro cyclist, the final stage of the 2011 Tour Down under). So while it was at a similar time that we were getting drip drip info about the Armstrong/USADA investigation, at this point Dr. Del Moral, just like Armstrong, had not faced any music. The context though is that both Vaughters and Matt White had previously been teammates of both Armstrong and Hamilton at US Postal and had both previously been on the team at the same time as Del Moral. Maybe Vaughters would have fired White anyway even if he’d sent Lowe to an innocent local GP, we’ll never know. But he didn’t, he sent him to Dr. Del Moral who was subsequently banned for life from the sport of cycling when the USADA investigation finally came to a head.
For life?
Well, his ban was subsequently reduced to five years because he threw Johan Bruyneel under the bus and Bruyneel was given a life ban instead.
So, what’s this got to do with Jayco-Alula?
Matt White is still there on that team and is only there because he got fired from Garmin-Cervelo in 2011 (although there were rumours he was due to join the new Australian team before he got fired from Garmin). He actually nearly lost his job with Jayco-Alula too (when they were still Orica-GreenEdge). That was in 2012, among all the fallout from the Armstrong shitshow, White admitted to doping while on US Postal (he was ‘Rider 9’) and Orica ‘suspended’ him, but then re-instated him after he had served a six-month suspension. All very messy eh?
Yes. It’s a long way from the not-against-the-rules carbon monoxide rebreathers and ketone drinks which qualify as doping controversies these days.
Indeed it is.
